Sunday 15 January 2012

Filling in the gaps, or not.

I’m still putting music on Sibelius today, and filling in gaps in my sketches. There’s a bit in an aria that Amy sings that has an ascending chordal line in the orchestral parts, and (as I’m putting it all in piano reduction first (a necessity as there’s a workshop I’m preparing for on the 8th Feb and I have to have something to give the pianist - I’d rather write it in almost-full score straight away, or somewhere in between...)) the whole thing is littered with slurs and ties (notes will stack up on top of each other, so each note continues to be held under the next note when it comes in). It’s taking ages just making it look understandable, mucking about with stems going up or down etc.


I’m having to bribe myself to get a certain number of bars done before I can have a break. Sometimes it’s really satisfying getting everything down on paper but today it’s too much of a hassle. I want to get going on new material but I have to make this presentable for the performers and so I’ve filled in the bits where my sketches are complete and am egging myself on to close the gaps between these bits. It’s a pity I’ve already had lunch (ridiculously early in the name of “doing-something-other-than-working-out-what-goes-in-that-bar) as otherwise I could procrastinate over that. Perhaps I’ll just have to have another lunch...


On the other hand I could have probably filled in the gap I left to write this post in the time that I wrote this. Ah well. Time to stop whining and just get on with it.



I can’t work out my own rhythms (or at least it is taking me ages).

I’m having great difficulty working out how to dictate the rhythms for Paula’s song today. It’s very frustrating. I’m not sure whether I’m playing an exactly notate-able rhythm, or whether it’s just a kind of swung rhythm over a sometime salsa beat, sometimes 7/8 time signature rhythm. It’s very bizarre, and something that I find quite often happens: when you’ve arrived at something through a kind of gradual building up of layers of improvisation (Bayesian improvisation?!?), the rhythms feel very natural, but as soon as you try and dictate it, the “having-to-find-the-beat-ness-and-time-signature-ness” of everything messes with your mind and everything starts to sound stunted and forced. Or maybe I”m just being particularly slow today...


Actually this usually means I’ve got to have a break - I end up not being able to see the musical wood for the rhythmical trees, as it were. So I’m going to give up and watch Sherlock Holmes. The “just give up and come back to it later” compositional technique always works surprisingly well I find....


....and it did. I’ve sorted the rhythms out. Proof that procrastination works. Sometimes.


Friday 13 January 2012

Time for Sibelius.

I’ve got to the point where I feel I need to get some stuff put into the computer (I only ever use a pen and paper when writing). Psychologically it seems to provide evidence that one has actually done something, and that the pages and pages of scribbles do actually make some sense. So I’ve spent the entire day just inputting notes into the computer. This also means that if my house burns down, I won’t have lost the manuscript (yes, at this point in the compositional process, I also start to become slightly paranoid....)


Becoming frightfully inspired...

Everything seems to be going right today. This is really quite unusual. My usual compositional practice involves an almost constant state of very low level frustration that I’m not managing to put down on paper what’s in my head, or what’s roughly in my head but not quite because I can’t work out what’s actually in my head, or could potentially be in my head if I could stop wandering off from the piano every five minutes to do something inane and pointless instead, and I spend the whole day clutching at musical straws just coming up with a pathetic copy of would be in my head if I could only reach it.


But today, everything is inspiring, and things just seem to be working, sometimes without any effort at all. I’m sure it’s just because my composing muscles are pretty warmed up now, and I think I’ve lived with the characters long enough to be able to instinctively know how they would think about something or express something.


I think I’d be quite annoying to live with today though. I’m behaving like some parody of a romantic poet and wandering around marveling at everything. A crow flying past, getting tossed about on the air currents, just gave me a really good idea for a phrase. Ah well, best just enjoy it as I’m sure it won’t last.


Do Amy Jim and Paula know they are in an opera?

One thing that’s gradually been dawning on me to think about in the last few weeks is whether my characters actually know they are in an opera or not. And I’ve decided the answer is both, or at least, sometimes they are more aware of the theatricality of their performances than at other times. Or perhaps it’s always ambiguous, I’m not sure. I got to thinking about this when I was writing Amy and Jim’s seduction duet. Are they simply going over the top in a sort of over-the-top raunchy-Carry-On way that I have the feeling might of floated Jim Mollison’s boat, or are they deliberately camping it up for the audience or simply for their own theatrical enjoyment? It’s probably a bit of all three.


In Paula’s jogging scene, is she being herself, talking to herself, or perhaps getting the more motivated part of herself to talk to the lazy Paula, is she just proclaiming these promises to the Thames Estuary, or us in the audience?


I’m not really sure but I’m really enjoying playing around between the boundaries of these viewpoints. That last sentence makes me sound rather more cerebral than I actually am. To be honest I try not to think about this stuff too much and just spend the day singing and playing the piano, trying to create the most expressive and characterful phrases that I can. I have a slight fear that if I think too much my brain will fall out and it will all stop working, and I’ll suddenly be unable to write anything....


Finding Paula

In the last week I’ve been setting a monologue by Paula, one of the three main characters in the opera. Without wanting to spoil the plot, I think it’s safe to say that there are several different time periods within the opera - that of the modern day, and that of the time when Amy was still alive.


Near the beginning of the opera we see Paula, jogging along by the Thames Estuary, thinking about how she wants to improve her life (“I will spend less time on Facebook”: how I identify with that line of the libretto....!).


Some parts of the text immediately suggest the way that they should be set, but with Paula’s monologue this was not the case: I found her character quite hard to pinpoint and got stuck for quite a while on this section. As Paula and Amy are in very different places in their life, and are/were living in very different times and cultures, I wanted to find some musical way to represent this difference. Also, I had the feeling that Paula, although she had the potential to really ‘live’ life, was at present rather trapped in a rather superficial existence, even though (whether she currently realised it not) she was searching for some kind of deeper meaning to life. But in the end, after all the sitting at the piano trying to think profound thoughts about musical character representation, well, the idea of how to set this passage came to me while I was jogging...


I’ve decided to set this song in a quasi pop-song format, with intros, bridges, choruses and verses. Paula repeats mantras to herself about how she will improve her life and herself, and I could imagine her saying these things repeatedly, and increasingly confidently on her jog, as she gets buoyed up by her endorphin-boosting run. Also, in harmonic terms, I wanted to start with something fairly straight, almost banal, and gradually add more and more harmonic colour as the song progressed, as Paula becomes more confident about enriching her existence and we see her potential to do so.


So, in the name of research again, I decided to crack open a bottle of wine and spend the evening plugged into my iPod playing along to Lily Allen songs all night. It was surprisingly enjoyable...


To be honest I didn’t think I’d gain a great deal from harmonic analysis of Lily Allen songs but I actually learnt quite a lot that I tried to musically internalise and then reproduce in my own musical improvisations later on that evening and the following day (I should say, I spent about 8 hours doing all this, before I even thought about setting any words. I suppose if I do something I decide to do it quite a lot...). For instance, the harmony in many of her songs is very repetitive, but (I certainly find that) one can easily get lost in the music and not realise quite how repetitive the music actually is: rather than getting bored you get lulled into a groove etc. (but I am the kind of person who will listen to one song repeatedly for weeks, so maybe this is just me). I think one of the reasons behind this might be a scarcity of Dominant 7th chords at the end of phrases or four-bar riffs, so there’s a lack of the question and answer type tension you get in classical music. One notable exception to this is at the end of the bridge before a return to a chorus for example, when that sense of return to something is desired. Also, and this I know is stating the obvious, but the chords are usually very simple. Adding any blue notes (which is basically all I do with my harmony) made my ‘pop-song’ sound too jazzy, and I didn’t want that, but using only major and minor harmonies just sounded too derivative. In the end I decided to use fairly conventional harmony (major or minor chords with usually only one or two, non-bluesy notes added) in unusual progression, and this seemed to do the job of referencing the music that Paula would probably be listening to at the same time as (hopefully) making the music sound my own.


One last thing to say is that all this listening also helped me to clarify how I’d treat the two women vocally. Paula’s vocal phrases are usually contained within a much smaller interval than Amy’s: e.g. the highest and lowest notes are usually less than a 5th. This both references a more ‘pop-song’ like way of singing but also sounds less formal, more chilled than Amy’s sometimes rather strained Joyce Grenfell-like utterances.


There’s a whole load of other stuff going on in this scene - plane noises becoming something else (not going to spoil the plot!), representing the setting sun with various harmonic tricks, and the whole section is loosely influenced dynamically by the fact that high tides in the Thames Estuary occur at 08:38 and 21:15 (well, they did on the 4th January, which is a few weeks out but that’s the best I could do). But I’ve run out of steam now, more another time...


Sunday 8 January 2012

On being very glad about living in a detached house in the middle of nowhere...

I recently moved to a little house in the middle of nowhere (there is one bus a week, so if using public transport you can either get out for 2 hours, or a week and 2 hours....) and decided to experiment with completely cutting myself off from the outside world. I find composing ridiculously difficult, even though I can’t imagine ever doing anything else for the rest of my life, and the more I do of it, the more difficult I find it. So any distraction is a temptation as a result of this, and in episodes of particular writers block I frequently end up in a pit of over-email-checking-induced self-hatred combined with an encyclopedic knowledge of every item on the Topshop website (often with too much of it arriving at my house several days later...). So, in this new place, I have neither phone nor internet, and a mobile that only gets reception if I sit on the kitchen windowsill. Quite how long I’ll keep this up I don’t know, but it seems to be working incredibly well for composing...


Anyway, on several days this week I’ve been particularly glad that I don’t share any walls with neighbours. I’ve been setting a rather steamy (and at times hilarious) love scene between Amy and Jim. As I’m sure every pioneering aviating couple do, they choose to seduce themselves in the language of aircraft parts...


So, most of today has been taken up with trying to first vocalise, work out the rough notes of, and then notate, different ways of saying “Oh Jim” and “Oh Johhnie” (Jim Mollison’s nickname for Amy Johnson) in a variety of sexually provocative ways that would be more than at home in a particularly saucy scene in a Carry On movie. I think the postman may think I’m a total nutcase. But let’s just say there are lots of different ways to say/sing these words, and some of them contain intervals as large as a 10th...


I’m setting this entire number as a somewhat deranged 30’s music hall number, with instrumental improvisational-like interludes which gradually get more and more overexcited and harmonically unhinged as Amy and Jim find more and more innuendo-laden airplane parts to use as euphemisms. I have been having the time of my life doing this and am wondering whether I’m wasted in the classical world and had better move into B movie sound track writing...


Anyway, more about the music that is currently inspiring the opera another day I think. There is still plenty of innuendo-laden text to set....”Yes, yes, yes you are my Tiger!”*


*(as in Tiger Moth.....)


How to start?



I find starting a new composition terrifying. And the more I compose, the more terrifying it gets. Whether it’s a short piano piece or a large scale chamber work, I still devote much of my time and energy at the beginning of the compositional process to not starting. In fact one of the only times you will find my house in a tidy state is when I’m “starting” a piece. So as the prospect of actually having to write something huge actually became a reality, I decided by far the most sensible thing to do would be to block it all out and go and book a flight in a Gypsy Moth, the plane that Amy flew to Australia in in 1930. During this time I also read copious literature about blind flying (flying with only the instruments in the cockpit, necessary in low/zero visibility conditions), became an expert on thermal air currents and how to tell the different types from each other by examining the different cloud formations present, read a whole dissertation on David Beckham’s accent, transcribed lots of big band music, five Lily Allen songs, and watched a fair amount of 1960‘s BBC newsreader clips and several The only way is Essex episodes on Youtube, ALL in the name of research....


Although in part my insistence on understanding exactly how an “Artificial Horizon Indicator” works in a Gypsy Moth may have had something to do with delay tactics, in reality, really getting under the skin of what you are going to write about it vitally important. I’ll try to give a few instances to convince you below...


Unfortunately, when the day came to fly a Gypsy Moth, the wind conditions were too high, but my would-have-been instructor nevertheless took me out to see the plane in the hangar and let me climb inside. The most amazing thing about it was that you couldn’t see in front of you because the cockpit came above your site line, so, in order to see ahead you had to stick your head out the side! This was quite easy when on the ground...but at 80mph in heavy rain things would be very different...


Coincidentally I am the same height as Amy Johnson: a rather stunted 5 foot 4 inches, so I really could appreciate what it would have been like for her, stuck in that tiny cockpit for hour upon endless hour. This is something I’d not have really ‘known’ if I hadn’t experienced it, and that sense of not seeing ahead of you will be constantly in my mind when I’m writing the music to the scene where Amy and her husband Jim Mollison cross the Atlantic together. During the crossing they had to really put their trust in the instruments in the cockpit’s “dashboard” (I’m sure you don’t call it this but you know what I mean...) All those dials continually altering, and the skill in deducing the aircraft’s position through reading their combined data, will really have an effect on the musical fabric at this point in the work. For instance, when the plane is tossed about like a car on a bumpy road on the air currents, the altimeter would be varying by small-to-large amounts at a frequent rate. Whereas the compass would vary at a much more gradual, constant rate. The combination of these two types of movement, one erratic, one more constant, could be portrayed directly in the rhythm and melodic movement of, for instance, two of the instrumental parts. The way that all the dials come together to make some sort of sense, but are fairly useless individually, could effect the contrapuntal treatment of a particular passage (e.g. each part could be ‘incomplete’ itself, but add up to a coherent melody of texture when in combination with the whole ensemble).


Of course, one doesn’t need to take things so literally - this is just an example, and that sense of not being able to see out the aircraft will just be more of a ‘feelling’ that I keep in my mind whilst composing, which will very likely affect the harmonic and melodic choices that I make. But as I write this (and before I’ve tried it) I’m rather warming to that contrapuntal cockpit dial idea. Somehow that sense of individual elements (or instrumental parts) coming together to make more than a sum of their parts (as the altimeter, artificial horizon indicator and gyroscope can be interpreted together to give the pilot a very good or exact idea where they are in the world) seems rather appropriate both emotionally and compositionally. There’s something about subsuming the reality of what is inspiring the music into the compositional fabric of the music that seems to work, for me at least - not in order to make the audience think “Aha! that music represents the dials in the cockpit” - of course, that’s both impossible and rather inane, but, more specifically to recreate a mood or atmosphere that might help to conjure up the feelings that Amy and Jim might have experienced at that time in the minds of the audience. I don’t know. I’ll have to try it out....I’ll let you know how it goes...


But why David Beckham/TOWIE and BBC Newsreaders from the 60’s you ask? Well, each of the characters in the opera have very specific accents (Paula, a girl living near the Thames Estuary in 2010 has an estuary accent in my mind, whilst Jim Mollison spoke in very proper RP...), and in order to really get under their skins, I wanted to be able to really get as near to what would have been their voices into my ear in order to intuitively place these essentially-melodic vocal inflections into the music. Again, it’s not an exact copy I’m really after - this isn’t a big budget biopic where every gesture and vocal inflection of the lead role should be copied and perfectly reproduced after all. But our voices are so much part of us, and convey such a great deal of our characters, that it’s really important to me that I fully understand this before composing.


One specific example is Amy Johnson herself. I managed to find a ten minute clip of her which included quite a bit of footage of her speaking on Youtube. Even before she had touched down on Australian soil, Amy had become one of the first ever celebrities after being an unknown, underestimated pilot who many people thought should be occupying herself with finding herself a husband and cooking his dinner when she left Croydon airport at the beginning of her trip. One of the clips shows her being driven through the streets in an open top car, with a man supporting her elbow while she waves (as she was so exhausted after her flight that she hardly had the strength hold her arm up, but the public appetite for her was such that she was given hardly any time at all to herself to recover). She was a girl from Hull who had been thrust into superstardom, but in the video clips her slight awkwardness (or perhaps just exhaustion) is very evident. She tends to speak a little too fast, with fairly frequent awkward pauses where she struggles to think of things to say, and she has a tendency to place stresses on words which you wouldn’t usually stress. Melodically her voice is a fairly high monotone, with the odd much higher note when she says something like “I’m having such a wonderful time”. This overemphasis on the word “such” gives a sentence like this a kind of forced nature - a feeling of having to perform for the public and pretending to be oh-so-delighted see everyone - which perfectly conveys her situation at the time.


Amy said she felt more at home in the air, so one of my ideas was to let her sing completely fluidly and un-stint-edly when she was either flying or talking about flying, which would contrast to parts of the opera where she was talking about other aspects of her fame which she was uncomfortable with, whereupon some of the vocal traits noted above might come to influence the content of the vocal line. It’s amazing how an awareness of this has really helped me define Amy’s character and give her an identity in the actual musical material of the opera. And exactly the same goes for Paul with her estuary accent, and Jim with his plummy Queen’s English...


Oh, more about Lily Allen in a later post...

Meeting the libretto...

So, by this time, I had a clear idea in my head about Amy’s character, and I knew roughly what was going to happen in the opera. There was a lot I could do before I got the libretto (I spent many enjoyable hours listening to 30’s big band music, which Amy would have frequently heard (and in fact Jack Hylton wrote a song about her called Amy, Wonderful Amy) thinking how I could get used to this “research” malarky....) but really the proper compositional planning could only be started once I got the words....


It’s always quite nerve-wracking when you first meet a libretto. Even though I knew and loved Adam’s poetry, and knew we had very similar ideas about the opera’s “story”, there’s always a tiny element of “what if I hate it?!” panic when you first open the cover of any text that you know you’ll be living with constantly for the next six months of your life. I quickly realised this fear was completely unfounded however, and I absolutely loved what Adam had written. We met in a cafe in Huddersfield and Adam read through the text he had written (due to the opera’s quick turn around he gave me several scenes to begin work on, as he will finish the libretto whilst I am beginning to set scenes which he has already written). I left a cold and grey Huddersfield full of excitement about opera, although by now the terror and reality of actually having to do some work was beginning to set in...


Why Amy Johnson?







The simple answer to this is that Adam Strickson asked me to be involved in this opera, and had already come up with the basic subject matter and plot. Adam won an award from iMove, part of Yorkshire cultural programme for London 2012, for a large scale project called Wingbeats, which includes this opera, another opera which has already been performed called Flightpaths, with music by Steve Kilpatrick, and many other wonderful arts projects and events. You can find out more about it here. Although I didn’t really know anything about Amy Johnson at all when Adam asked me to be involved, I quickly realised after talking with him that this was a wonderful subject for an opera and everything about Amy appealed to me, both personally and artistically.

In preparation for writing the libretto, Adam had read a fantastic biography of Amy by Midge Gillies. It was great to go through this book and pick out all the things that interested me about Amy, and tell Adam about them. In this way, even though the original idea had not been mine, I felt I was able to put a great deal of input into the content of the opera and very soon felt that it was ‘our’ opera rather than just Adam’s. As it happened though, Adam had already independently written a short summary what interested him, and it almost exactly matched what I’d noted down. So that was a good sign!


In the summer I went up to Bridlington to see the premiere of Flightpaths. I was able to see the venue, and spent a few days in the town soaking up the atmosphere. On the Sunday I did a 20 mile walk along the coast, which actually gave me so many ideas for the opera! The scenery was amazing (despite the fact that at one point I got lost for about an hour in thick bramble and then slipped down a very muddy bank and got covered in mud...) and I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed fish and chips as much as I did at the end of that walk before getting the train back to my B&B in Brid). Amy spent a lot of time in the area, and so things I had read about in the biography and only known cerebrally, suddenly made proper sense. For instance, spending a whole day walking along the edge of the country, where land runs out and seeing the sea and the horizon really had a great effect on me, and is something I’m thinking about a lot now I’ve started writing the opera far out of sight of any coastline. The seemingly seamless merging of sea and sky in the far distance is something that I’m trying to portray in the harmony of the work, either by using very “open” sounding harmony, or by merging harmonic boundaries into each other. Just being able to see so far into the distance also made a great impression on me, and the horizon is a very important element of Amy’s story in many ways - that sense of exploration, the urge to travel beyond what she could see, etc. I also learnt later that the way pilots learn to stay level in their planes is to continually keep their position in check with the horizon. There’s something about this double function of the horizon, which both coaxed Amy into undertaking dangerous adventures as well as keeping her safe and up in the air, that really fascinated me.


Anyway, I came back from Bridlington really excited about the opera, about Amy, and about the performances, which at this point in time seemed so far in the future that they might never happen. This was all to change when I realised how much work I had to do though! Suddenly that premiere seemed terrifyingly close...